valid high-bit-depth image formats?

[shadowphile]

Hello fellow TG'ers.
I have a .ter file that has some problems and I can't access the original source.
I thought, "convert the heightfield to a HDR image and edit that."
Then use an image-map shader instead of a heightfield .ter file.

I found a utility called TerraConv for TG09 that still works for TG2, it just makes 16-bit or float TIFFs from a .ter file, or vice versa.

Problem is, I can't find an editor that doesn't clobber the image (Irfanview, Photoshop Elements 5) when I save it.  Supposedly dedicated apps like Artizen HDR ONLY do .hdr files. Most HDR-oriented editors are actually HDR creators for photographers that offer little in the way of paint-shop like features.

Anybody have a recommendation?  My original .ter file has features too close to the edge and they get ruined by the edge-blending.  I thought to add a gray border to my image (thus increasing the terrain size) but nothing I've tried will export an image that TG2 likes. It likes float TIFFs but otherwise complains about non-standard bit-depths like 16 and says to use an SGI file.  None of my programs even recognize an SGI file.

I wish I could avoid TIFF format altogether, it has too many compatibility issues.  Would the world please just settle on EXR!  
Regards,

[Oshyan]

Try a dedicated heightfield editor like Wilbur (free), or Leveller (a bit pricey), or World Machine, Geocontrol, L3DT, etc?

Unfortunately EXR isn't as well supported as we would like either. Photoshop proper (not Elements) does handle 16 bit images (TIFF included) better. Newer versions of The Gimp (open source freeware) or Cinepaint might also be good options.

- Oshyan

[Henry Blewer]

Blender can use EXR also. Using the compositor to manipulate the EXR image is a bit tricky. The Blender compositor is node based and not too difficult. Getting the right settings takes some work.

[shadowphile]

..actually I have no complaints about Blender, it handles just about anything!  I've been using it for conversion sometimes.  But paint mode is very limited and I suspect (have not really tried) that operations are in the 8-bit world.

I will look into Wilbur, it might work out better to edit the .ter file directly, if the tools are useful enough.  thanks for the idea!

[latego]

Dear Oshyan, why don't you add some more terrain formats to TG2? It is a few days work and would make the workflow much simpler. E.g. R32 (straight C floats dump), 16 bit TIFFs, 16 bit RAWs and POV-Ray like TGAs.

[Oshyan]

16 bit TIFFs are supported already (GeoTIFF). Additional format support is not necessarily "a few days work". We use an existing image library to avoid having to write this common functionality ourselves. If it's already supported in the library, it would be fairly easy to add in to TG2. If not, it's more laborious.

Certainly support for more formats will be added in the future, but actually the formats we already support are the most widely used and supported by other apps that are the subject of this post. RAW formats have notorious issues with byte order, resolution, and other non-specified parameters that must be carried manually from app to app. We already support TGA but the POVRay extensions to it are as far as I understand fairly non-standard and not necessarily widely supported.

- Oshyan